Written: 11 March 1939.
Source: Socialist Appeal [New York], December 30, 1939.
Translated: Socialist Appeal.
Transcription/HTML Markup: D. Walters.
Public Domain: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive 2008. This work is completely free to copy and distribute.
The following article, written on March 11, 1939, first appeared in the December 30, 1939, issue of Socialist Appeal. It is reprinted from Writings of Leon Trotsky [1939–40] (New York: Pathfinder, 1973). The Dies Committee was the House Un-American Activities Committee headed by Texas Democrat Martin Dies.
Why did I agree to appear before the Dies Committee? Naturally not in order to facilitate the realization of Mr. Dies’s political aims, particularly the passing of federal laws against one or another extremist “party.” Being an irreconcilable opponent not only of fascism but also of the present-day Comintern, I am at the same time decidedly against the suppression of either of them.
The outlawing of fascist groups would inevitably have a fictitious character: as reactionary organizations they can easily change color and adapt themselves to any kind of organizational form since the influential sections of the ruling class and of the governmental apparatus sympathize considerably with them and these sympathies inevitably increase during times of political crisis.
As for the Comintern, suppression could only help this completely degenerated and compromised organization. The difficulty in the Comintern’s situation is a result of the irreconcilable contradiction between the international workers’ movement and the interests of the Kremlin ruling clique. After all its zigzags and deceptions, the Comintern has obviously entered its period of decomposition. The suppression of the Communist Party would immediately re-establish its reputation in the eyes of the workers as a persecuted fighter against the ruling classes.
However, the question is not exhausted by this consideration. Under the conditions of the bourgeois regime, all suppression of political rights and freedom, no matter whom they are directed against in the beginning, in the end inevitably bear down upon the working class, particularly its most advanced elements. That is a law of history. The workers must learn how to distinguish between their friends and their enemies according to their own judgment and not according to the hints of the police.
It is not difficult to predict an ad hominem objection: “But just that Soviet government in which you yourself took part proscribed all political parties except the Bolsheviks?” Entirely correct; and to this day I am ready to bear responsibility for its actions. But one cannot identify the laws of civil war with the laws of peaceful periods; the laws of the dictatorship of the proletariat with the laws of bourgeois democracy.
If one considered Abraham Lincoln’s policy exclusively from the point of view of civil liberties, then the great president would not appear very favorably. In justification of course he could say that he was compelled to apply civil war measures in order to cleanse the democracy of slavery. Civil war is a state of tense social crisis. One or another dictatorship, inevitably growing out of the conditions of civil war, appears fundamentally as an exception to the rule, a temporary regime.
It is true that the dictatorship in the Soviet Union did not die out, but on the contrary took on monstrous totalitarian forms. This is explained by the fact that out of the revolution arose a new privileged caste which is incapable of maintaining its regime except through measures of a hidden civil war. It was precisely over this question that I broke with the Kremlin ruling clique. I was defeated because the working class, as a result of internal and external conditions, showed itself to be too weak to liquidate its own bureaucracy. I have, however, no doubt that the working class will liquidate it.
But whatever the situation in the USSR may be, the working class in the capitalist countries, threatened with their own enslavement, must stand in defense of freedom for all political tendencies including their own irreconcilable enemies. That is why I do not feel the slightest sympathy for the aims of the Dies Committee.
Last updated on: 3 December 2015